Terminals may be generally classified as mobile/portable terminals or stationary terminals according to their mobility. Mobile terminals may also be classified as handheld terminals or vehicle mounted terminals according to whether or not a user can directly carry the terminal.
Mobile terminals have become increasingly more functional. Examples of such functions may include data and voice communications, capturing images and video through a camera, recording audio, playing music files through a speaker system, and displaying images and video on a display unit. Some mobile terminals additionally provide functions such as playing an electronic game, or executing a function of multimedia players. Especially, recent mobile terminals may receive multicast signal for providing visual content such as broadcasts, videos, or television programs.
As it becomes multifunctional, a mobile terminal can be allowed to capture still images or moving images, play music or video files, play games, receive broadcast and the like, so as to be implemented as an integrated multimedia player.
Various attempts have been made to implement complicated functions in such a multimedia device by means of hardware or software.
In case of searching a message associated with a specific person among messages transceived with a specific person or a plurality of persons by using such a mobile terminal, a user should memorize a related keyword, or should scroll a screen for a long time. If it takes a lot of time to search for a specific message, chats may be interrupted or a subject may be changed, resulting in a meaningless search result. Such inconvenience is increased when chats through messages are performed with a plurality of persons.